(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for building an address database and a method thereof.
More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus for extracting addresses from mail in which the addresses are respectively written and building an address database using the extracted addresses, and a method thereof.
The present invention was supported by the IT R&D program of MIC/IITA [2006-X-001-02, Development of Element Technology for Real-time Postal Distribution].
(b) Description of the Related Art
Address information can be used with many different objects, and has a large effect on performance of automatically classifying mail, Therefore, building an accurate address database is one of the necessary conditions for improving efficiency of a mail service.
As a result, there is need for collecting countrywide address information, building an address database using the addresses information, and then continuously managing and substantially utilizing the database.
Also, it is required to mobilize human resources and to continuously expend effort, and it is difficult to build an address database well. For these reasons, an attempt to build a mail address database has been recently realized in Korea.
In the related art, a mail address database is built by a method in which addresses are collected by postal service employees, and are arranged and input. However, there is a problem of reducing the reliability and quality of the address database because some mail addresses are omitted while collecting them and an operator may make a mistake while inputting them.
To solve the problem, it is possible to improve the quality of the address database by continuously checking and complementing it with an automatic classifier. However, this causes a huge expense by trial and error in the initial process of building the address database.
Also, even if the address database is initially perfect, the perfection of the address database is debased after a period since creation and extinction of mail addresses is repeated. Accordingly, to maintain the correspondence between data of the address database with real mail addresses in the country, there is no choice but to depend on endeavors of postal service employees such as collecting mail addresses, and of others. This continuously causes huge expenses to build and maintain the address database.
Further, it is possible to extract address information from mail by using an automatic recognition technology. However, there is a problem in the reliability of the extracted address information. Accordingly, it is difficult to apply the extracting of address information to building an address database that can be relied on.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.